Young children demonstrate the ability to make inferences about the preferences of other agents based on their choices. However, there exists no overarching account of what children are doing when they learn about preferences or how they use that knowledge. We use a rational model of preference learning, drawing on ideas from economics and computer science, to explain the behavior of children i...

In this paper, the authors propose a novel bias detection method based on social preference learning for targets on competing topics such as “GalaxyTab vs. iPad” in Twitter. People tend to evaluate a topic by expressing their opinions towards the associated targets such as price and quality. To exploit characteristics of social data, targets are extracted by a modified HITS algorithm on a tripa...

Examples are given of how the widespread learning processes of sexual imprinting, song learning and song preference learning may affect the evolutionary processes of sexual selection and speciation in birds. They show that sexual imprinting may occur together with perceptual biases, giving rise to preferences for mates with exaggerated traits. Sexual imprinting may also give rise to exaggeratio...

It is often difficult to determine what actually was done in work involving data collected with stated preference surveys because the terms used to describe various procedures have ambiguous and sometimes conflicting meanings. Further, terms used to describe data collection procedures often are confounded with terms used to describe statistical techniques. We call for the use of a common nomenc...

0020-0255/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc doi:10.1016/j.ins.2008.05.028 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +886 7 6577711x65 E-mail addresses: [email protected], dr.deor@g The lack of consistency in decision making can lead to inconsistent conclusions. In fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP) method, it is difficult to ensure a consistent pairwise comparison. Furthermore, establishing a ...

In this paper, we consider a general problem of semi-supervised preference learning, in which we assume that we have the information of the extreme cases and some ordered constraints, our goal is to learn the unknown preferences of the other places. Taking the potential housing place selection problem as an example, we have many candidate places together with their associated information (e.g.,...

Resolving location expressions in text to the correct physical location, also known as geocoding or grounding, is complicated by the fact that so many places around the world share the same name. Correct resolution is made even more difficult when there is little context to determine which place is intended, as in a 140-character Twitter message, or when location cues from different sources con...

Aptness, defined as how the vehicle is well able to cover the salient features of the tenor (e.g., oil is like liquid gold vs. a train is like a worm), is claimed to be an important factor in the preference for metaphors over similes, or vice versa. This study was an attempt to test for the supposed correlation between the perceived degree of aptness and a priori stylistic preference for metaph...

This paper proposes a quadratic programming method (QPM) for ranking alternatives based on multiplicative preference relations (MPRs) and fuzzy preference relations (FPRs). The proposed QPM can be used for deriving a ranking from either a MPR or a FPR, or a group of MPRs, or a group of FPRs, or their mixtures. The proposed approach is tested and examined with two numerical examples, and compara...

Outranking relations are most often built using a concordance-discordance principle. Such relations are, in general, neither transitive nor complete. This is not to say that the concordance-discordance principle does not impose some "structural" restrictions on these relations. We show why this question may be of some importance for analyzing the various techniques designed to build a recommend...